The poqallas' control over larger amounts of land gives them access to more labour, which allows them to invest in the construction of the landesque capital. As institutions, the poqallas are structures of power, and the material presented in the previous chapter suggests that their power is derived mainly from their economic control, and that a poqalla can be perceived as a kind of landlord. The revolutionary Derg government certainly took this view when it assumed power in 1974, and accused many poqallas of being landlords who exploited the people. The extent to which the poqallas can be justifiably viewed as landlords is examined in more detail in Chapter Four; Chapter Six looks at the way in which these government assumptions impacted upon the position and role of the poqalla after the revolution. In this chapter, I examine the nature of the different exchanges between the poqallas and others in the community and the way in which they go far beyond the realm of the economic. In the literature, the poqallas have first and foremost been understood as sacred ritual leaders or priests, and it is this aspect I consider here. This chapter argues that the ritual role of the poqalla is as important to the production of Konso landscapes and livelihoods as the economic role, and that the ritual and the economic cannot be separated.

The customary agricultural practices and institutions that are described in this Part of the book are those practices and power relations whose legitimacy is grounded in the claims to tradition, to the ways things have always been and should be. Using Bourdieu's terms, this represents the orthodoxy in Konso. The title of this specific chapter is borrowed and developed from Appadurai's edited book, The Social Life of Things (1986). Others have taken up his approach before now, for example Nyerges (1997) uses his ideas to talk about ‘the social life of resources’, and Longley (2001) uses his ideas to talk about ‘the social life of seeds’. For these authors, Appadurai's approach to things is useful because it sees them not as inert, but as objects with ‘careers’, ‘life histories’ and ‘biographies’, which are ‘fully part of social life’ (Nyerges, 1997: 12). Thus the environment is presented not merely as a backdrop to social life, but as deeply inter-connected with, and part of, that social life. This approach has therefore much in common with the approach to agriculture as a social process discussed in the introduction. In the next chapter, the approach is taken further to show that not only are the practices and institutions part of social life, they are also part of ritual life. The title the ‘Ritual Life of Agriculture’ is used to show that these social processes are also cultural processes too, replete with ritual actions, relationships and meanings.

The Konso people live on and around a small range of mountains, some 600 km south of Addis Ababa, in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia (see Map 1.1). These mountains rise to a height of 2,500 m, and from above 700 m they are scored with neat, dry stone terraces (Amborn, 1989). To the outsider, the area is distinctive in many ways: the terraced landscape marks it out as different from the hot lowlands that surround the mountains, and from the other cultivated mountains in the area. In the area marked on the map, they also speak their own language, Afa Xonso, an Eastern Cushitic language. It has some links to Oromiffa spoken by the Boran and the Guji to the east, and other links to the Dirashe to the north-west, but the languages are not mutually comprehensible. The Konso are also recognizable by their style of dress: women often wear thick home-spun cotton skirts which are gathered and folded into two layers; the men sometimes wear home-spun and woven cotton shorts, often striped and brightly coloured.

Konso villages are nucleated, walled and extremely dense and compact. The density of the settlements and the way in which they are criss-crossed by many narrow and labyrinthine paths led Hallpike (1972) and others, Sutton (1989), to describe these settlements as towns. Though in many ways this word is appropriate, it is less confusing to describe them as villages, distinguishing them from the more urban recent settlements of, for example, Fasha and Karate, both of which have grown up around market places. Karate is the main town, and the location of government offices.

This book is about the construction of a landscape. The landscape in question is the intensive agricultural terraced landscape of Konso in south-west Ethiopia. The book focuses on the role of culture in the construction of the landscape, and explores the significance for development of the landscape itself, and the social and cultural institutions that construct and maintain it. Through this study of one landscape and one people it is hoped that the processes and connections between different aspects of people's lives and their environments will be better understood, contributing to understandings of landscape production in general, and generating insights that will be of relevance to initiatives concerned with environmental conservation and the tackling of poverty.

Konso lends itself to this study. It is an excellent example of an indigenous and intensive agricultural landscape that has been maintained for at least four hundred years, despite what can only have been enormous social changes. The Konso hills rise to a height of 2000m out of the dry Rift Valley plains, and the rugged hillsides are scored with dry stone-walled bench terraces constructed meticulously by hand. Each terrace is divided into square-ridged basins and covered in a riot of crops such as sorghum, maize, millet, qat (the narcotic), cotton, coffee, beans, and sweet potatoes. Trees are also grown on the terraces. There are other hilly areas in the region: some are terraced or have other soil and water conservation structures, but none is worked as intensively as Konso (Amborn, 1989).

Positioning of the book

The purpose of this book is to offer an introduction to an important field in economics, entitled geographical economics, which sets out to explain the distribution of economic activity across space. In doing so, it endeavors to bring together and apply insights from various fields of economics. The book will therefore be of interest to students and scholars from international economics and business, as well as from economic geography, regional economics, and urban economics. The fact that we offer an “introduction” does not mean that we avoid models or shy away from difficult concepts; it indicates that we have attempted to write a book that is accessible to readers and students who are new to the field of geographical economics.

Although we introduce and discuss various modeling approaches, we keep the required technicalities to a minimum. Whenever possible we draw attention to important concepts and applications in special interest boxes, making ample use of examples and diagrams to explain the workings of the models. Chapter 3, which explains the structure of the core model of geographical economics, gives background derivations in technical notes. Throughout the book the required level of mathematical competence required does not go beyond simple optimization techniques that should be familiar to upper-level undergraduate and first-year graduate students, both in economics and in other fields of social sciences.

Introduction

Chapter 1 of this book has presented a number of stylized facts about the clustering of economic activity to justify our inquiry into the relationships between economics and geography. In chapters 2 to 4 we have mainly looked at this relationship from a theoretical point of view. In this chapter we start with a reminder that location matters. This chapter and the next focus on the empirics of geographical economics, in order to assess whether the spatial facts can be explained by geographical economics models as introduced in chapters 3 and 4.

We start with a brief review in section 5.2 of the main facts about the concentration and agglomeration of economic activity. This continues, and partly restates, our discussion of stylized facts of location in chapter 1. Against this background, section 5.3 answers the question of whether these facts can be reconciled with the various economic theories of location presented in chapters 2 to 4. To provide this answer, we summarize the main predictions about clustering (if any) that follow from the various theories, and conclude that the stylized facts are in accordance with multiple theories (and not only with geographical economics). This does not come as a great surprise, since many empirical studies about the concentration or the agglomeration of economic activity are, quite simply, not primarily concerned with the testing of specific theories.

Introduction

As we noted in the preface, it was a long time ago that Ohlin (1933) observed that the fields of trade theory on the one hand and regional and urban economics on the other hand had, in principle, the same research objectives. Both research areas want to answer the questions: “Who produces what, where, and why?” Despite Ohlin's observation, each field has continued to go its own way since the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 showed that trade theory assumes that countries are dimensionless points in space. Trade theorists are mostly interested in how market structure, production techniques, and consumer behavior interact (Neary, 2004). The resulting factor and commodity prices determine the pattern of international trade flows. Location is, at best, an exogenous factor, and usually does not play a role of any significance. Regional and urban economics, in contrast, takes market structure and prices as given and tries to find out which allocation of space is most efficient. The underlying behavior of consumers and producers, central in trade theory, is less important (Fujita and Thisse, 1996). Although both strands of literature produce valuable insights in their own right, trade theory and regional and urban economics are productively combined in geographical economics.

This chapter discusses and explains the core model of geographical economics, a small, general equilibrium model developed by Krugman (1991a, 1991b). As we shall see, the equilibrium equations of this model are non-linear.

Introduction

The central message of chapter 1 is that geography is important. Economic activity is not evenly distributed across space. On the contrary, clustering of economic activities can be found at various levels of aggregation: the considerable variation in economic size of cities or regions at the national level, or the uneven distribution of wealth and production at the global level. The question arises, of course, as to why location seems to be so important for economic activities. To answer this question, we need an analytical framework in which geography plays a part one way or another. In particular, we would like to show that the decisions of economic agents are partly determined by geography, and that they provide a framework in which the geography of the economy itself can be derived from the behavior of economic agents. This, in a nutshell, is what the approach developed in this book tries to do. We want to make absolutely clear from the start that this approach, referred to throughout this book as geographical economics but also known as new economic geography (see the preface), is by no means the first theory to address location issues. There is a long tradition that deals with the questions to be discussed in this chapter. The novelty of geographical economics as such is mainly in the way it tackles the relationship between economics and geography.

Introduction

In chapter 3 we developed and discussed the main features of the core model of geographical economics. Most importantly, the model provides a coherent framework: it is a miniature world in which the demand in one region for the manufactures of another region is not exogenously imposed but derived from the income generated in the region through production and exports. Although we set up the different aspects of the model as simple and tractable as possible, it turned out to be quite complex to study analytically.

This chapter builds on the analysis of chapter 3. First, we give a full analysis of the core model derived in chapter 3. Using simulations, we learn to understand what the long-run equilibria look like in the core model (thus endogenizing λr, the share of the manufacturing labor force in region r). As shown below, the so-called break point and sustain point will help us to summarize the long-run characteristics of the core model. Second, we show how these new insights regarding the core model of chapter 3 enable us to analyze some other important models in geographical economics. More specifically, we discuss three alternative models, each of which by now has also gained the reputation of being a “core” model of geographical economics.

1. (i) Intermediate goods model. In the absence of interregional labor mobility, the main agglomeration mechanism is connection to suppliers of intermediate goods.

2. (ii) Generalized model. Incorporating both the core model of chapter 3 and the intermediate goods model allows for a richer menu of long-run equilibria.

3. […]

Introduction

Typically, the long-run equilibrium allocation of footloose economic activity in the core model of geographical economics is characterized either by complete agglomeration or by spreading. Which equilibrium gets established depends critically on the initial distribution of the manufacturing labor force and a few structural parameters, notably the level of transport costs, the elasticity of substitution, and the share of income spent on manufactures. If transport costs, for example, are relatively low, the spreading equilibrium is unstable and agglomeration is the stable long-run equilibrium. Our simulations in chapter 4 with the core model of geographical economics clearly illustrate this (see figures 4.2 and 4.3). For many parameter settings the agglomeration forces are stronger than the spreading forces in the core model, which has only one spreading force: the demand for manufactured goods from the immobile labor force (the farm workers). We have also argued that the forces of agglomeration dominate in the multi-region version of the Krugman (1991a) model (the racetrack economy), such that economic activity is typically concentrated in one location, or only a few. Moreover, if the economy is concentrated in two or three locations, the distribution of economic activity is evenly spread among those locations.

These model outcomes are hard to reconcile with empirical observations. In reality we observe, at various levels of aggregation, multiple centers of economic activity that differ considerably in size (measured by the share of manufacturing production or the share of the mobile labor force).